Diabetes alone should not be a reason for withholding adjuvant chemotherapy for stage III colon cancer.

Background: With increasing prevalence of diabetes mellitus and colon cancer, the number of patients suffering from both diseases is growing, and physicians are being faced with complicated treatment decisions.

Objective: To investigate the association between diabetes and treatment/course of stage III colon cancer and the association between colon cancer and course of diabetes.

Materials And Methods: Additional information was collected from the medical records of all patients with both stage III colon cancer and diabetes (=201) and a random sample of stage III colon cancer patients without diabetes (=206) in the area of the population-based Eindhoven Cancer Registry (1998-2007).